Farewell, Jeets

Derek Jeter’s baseball career spanned twenty years, encompassing both the steroid era (the controversial part of it, at least) and the “Moneyball” revolution, and it’s hard not to read in all the public outpouring of emotion these past few weeks and months, during Jeter’s farewell tour, a kind of outsized mourning, as if he were not just a retiring Yankee captain but the sport’s last true hero. I recall talking to the Braves manager Bobby Cox, himself a throwback, four and a half years ago, before the start of his own final season in uniform. “Derek Jeter is just the ultimate baseball player to me,” he said. “He plays it like a professional, like a baseball player should play the game.” The implication was that we might at this late stage have come to expect otherwise. And while Cox made a point of resisting easy nostalgia, arguing that many things about baseball had improved since he got his start, in the late nineteen-sixties, he still lamented certain changes on the diamond. “Over all, baseball, for me, there’s a lot of slugging in it,” he said, hinting at a connoisseur’s preference for subtler talents. “My philosophy has always been pitching and defense.” Jeter had just enough power to appear menacing, but not so much that he could be dismissed as yet another brawny goon. For his glovework—for those twisting, airborne throws across the infield, and for his uncanny instincts—he had been awarded a fourth Gold Glove, in 2009. In 2010, Cox’s last year, Jeter would go on to win another.

If your allegiance was not to the Yankees, as mine was not, and if you were at all susceptible to cynicism, then Jeter’s superhuman reputation could grate. He had good timing, you had to give him that. He came along at a moment when George Steinbrenner had mellowed into an ideal version of himself—desperate and profligate, as always, but wise enough to trust the opinions of people who knew more about the game than he did. Jeter’s knack for imprinting himself on the postseason was worthy of real awe, but it inspired such mawkish praise, as the years continued, that you sometimes wished Christopher Hitchens cared enough about baseball to blaspheme its living saint. Jeter was a winner, we kept hearing, and it was true that the Yankees often won. But there were rational explanations for their success, like the size of their payroll, their higher on-base percentage, and their excellent pitching. In Lawrence, Kansas, the James family (as in Bill James) established a rule for watching baseball on television. Whoever held the remote was responsible for muting the commentary whenever Jeter’s name came up, lest everyone be subjected to insulting psychoanalysis—insulting because Jeter’s ability to inside-out a cutter had somehow metastasized into virtue. Anyone who failed to hit mute was guilty of “dereliction of clicker.”

This brings us back to those Gold Gloves. Jeter was not, in fact, a very good defensive player, not by the evolving standards of sabermetric analysis. It does not take anything away from the heroic moments (the flip to nab Giambi, the sacrificing of the chin), or from the lanky elegance with which he typically fielded his position, to note that his range was limited, and that this made him, on balance, a mediocre shortstop. Jeter’s deficiencies were largely invisible to the naked eye. He fielded memorably—just not as often as a quicker man might have. This is more or less the established truth now (Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ G.M., said as much to me several years ago), but throughout Jeter’s prime it was heretical, and he became an unwitting pawn in baseball’s culture wars, holding firm in defense of the intangibles with every stoical readjustment of his brim. As with Tim Tebow, you staked a position on Jeter in part to signal what kind of fan you were: progressive or old-school.

And, as in the case of Tebow, Jeter sometimes did things that you could only marvel at, as though he were teasing your skepticism. Jeter won me over, at last, with the five-for-five outing in the summer of 2011, after an inevitably belabored milestone chase: the count up to three thousand hits. He was not, at that point in his career, a regularly productive hitter, and the odds of his going five-for-five in any game, let alone in the one that would get him across the mark, were less than one in a thousand. No matter for Jeets. No. 3000, of course, was a home run, just his third of the season. Statistical milestones are so acutely observed these days that anything less would have been annoying. By then, the culture war was essentially over, and baseball teams, with a few exceptions, were run intelligently, like regular businesses. The fact that Jeter was still a Yankee at all was an anomaly. He was a bankable movie star amid fantasy-league assets.

Jeter’s final act of heroism at Yankee Stadium, with the walk-off, game-winning single last Thursday night, was made all the more remarkable by the stunning fact that it was the first game he’d ever played in the Bronx with the team mathematically eliminated from postseason competition. It was his personal one-game playoff, you might say, and he rose to the occasion. Now the cynic interjects: Would the Yankees really have been eliminated from wild-card contention if they hadn’t been starting a shortstop as creaky as Derek Jeter every night, and batting him second, in spite of his minor-league production? Shouldn’t the consummate winner, so venerated for his leadership, have volunteered his own removal for the good of the squad? Easy for me to say, but the Yanks have done quite enough winning. He gave us what we wanted, which was to be reminded of how confounding this game is.